When Banu Subramaniam thinks about whether plants should be renamed so as not to honour white supremacist colonialists – Cecil Rhodes, for example, is commemorated in the names of 126 plant species – she contrasts it with how, for so many years in our patriarchal system, women were expected to change theirs. “That wasn’t considered complicated… and yet those in power give any number of reasons why this is,” says the professor of women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College, outside Boston, Massachusetts. Subramaniam is the author of the provocative new book, Botany of Empire. The book challenges plant science...